BoomerGirl.com

Parked by the fringe of Section 99 at Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio, I am having a little talk with Momma.

The passing of decades has changed the nature of our conversations in some ways, though in others not in the least.

The 6-year-old boy afraid to go to sleep because of the hook-armed murderer hiding under the bed is not much different from the 60-year-old man fretting over the awaited results of medical tests for a worrisome symptom that proves to be nothing.

Both man and boy need something from Mom.

In the first months following my mother's death in the spring of 2003, our one-sided chats at Green Lawn were awkward affairs. I carried the baggage of unfinished business and unspoken love to a glistening headstone of cinnamon-hued granite and simply stared at the etched symbols and words — the first few notes and lyrics of her favorite hymn.

It helps me that I see her these days in the eyes and words of women born in an era that served them the Great Depression for breakfast and World War II for lunch.

In the midst of the latter, my mother did assembly-line piecework at D.L. Auld, a Columbus factory where she turned out Purple Hearts that were ultimately issued, in lieu of missing limbs, to soldiers bound for home or, in lieu of missing sons, to grief-wracked mothers.

Momma, like many mothers of first-cusp baby boomers, was pinched out of the work force when the war ended and women were pink-slipped from jobs they had performed as well as or better than the men for whom they were pinch-hitting.

My mother had three children in three years and six under the age of 10 at one point.

My father forbade her to work outside the house even though portions of his meager paycheck were often lost to partying and poker with the boys.

In time, she got fed up with seeing her babies in the castoff clothes of well-meaning kin and strangers. She was tired of dealing with the recurrent quandary of having way too much month at the end of the money.

So, she started a bakery in her kitchen and, when the old man chafed at her bringing home the bacon because he spent his on beer, she more or less told him that he could go straight to hell. She had kids to raise.

Her bakery delivery force was her six children. She taught us how to make change and always say, "Thank you, ma'am." Then she lined us up at the backdoor and filled our arms with yet-warm and fragrant loaves of bread, pies, cakes and cinnamon rolls.

My mother would throw back her head and let loose a hyena laugh whenever "Leave It to Beaver" came on the tube. Her irony-tinged mirth was a reaction to the show's spectacularly ridiculous characterization of American motherhood: Barbara Billingsley doing her dusting while wearing a crisp cocktail dress, pearls and high heels.

To a certain kind of woman, June Cleaver was a flat-out insult. She never had to contend with a hung over Ward layin' sorry after spending the paycheck on a three-day bender.

Women of my mother's vintage fought and won battles for workplace equality while men were trying to win the war, only to see those victories nullified. Then, in middle age, they saw younger women carry the fight to the barricades and begin to secure workplace justice and equity.

My mother labored as a domestic while yet in middle school. She mothered her younger siblings and then six of her own. After her half-dozen were grown, she baby-sat strangers' children for years to help pay the bills. When her mind started to go, she hallucinated about babies in trees, sobbing that no one was feeding them.

I read the hymn lyrics on her headstone — "Precious memories, unseen angels" — and I try to talk to her. But, these days, all I catch is the wind sighing in the maple trees holding all those babies that I am finally able to see with heartbreaking clarity.